This is the question we get asked most often once a build is under way. Yes for the towns you genuinely work in. No for the ones on a list to make you look bigger. The test is simple: can you write something true about the place.
Why Leeds and Wakefield are two different searches
To you, a roof is a roof and the drive from Leeds to Wakefield is twenty minutes. To Google, "roofer in Leeds" and "roofer in Wakefield" are two separate questions from two separate people, and it answers them with two different sets of results.
So a single homepage that says "roofing across West Yorkshire" is competing in both towns with nothing specific to either. A firm with a proper Wakefield page, naming Wakefield in the heading and showing Wakefield jobs, is a better answer to the Wakefield question, and it usually wins.
There is also the human side, which matters more than the ranking. A homeowner in Ossett who lands on a page showing a job in Ossett has already decided you are local. That decision happens in about two seconds and nothing else on the page can buy it back.
What a town page has to contain to be worth having
Here is the bar. If a page cannot clear it, it is doing nothing for you, and Google's own spam policies are explicit that pages made only to funnel people to the same generic destination, which they call doorway pages, are not welcome.
Real local detail. The suburbs and villages you actually cover. The stone or the brick that is common round there. The age of the housing stock and what that means for the work. Terraces in Armley have different problems to new build estates at Thorpe Park, and saying so proves you have been there.
A job you have done in that town. One photo of one real job, with a line about what it was. This is the part most firms skip and it is the part that sells.
A phone number on the page. Tappable, near the top, repeated at the bottom. If you have a local number for that area, use it there.
Something a stranger could not have written. Response time from your yard. Whether you are there weekly or by arrangement. Parking, access, the one road that is always shut. Small true things.
Before you build a town page
It has to pass all six
- You actually take work in this town and would drive there tomorrow.
- You can name the suburbs and villages inside it without looking them up.
- You have at least one photo of a real job there, or will have soon.
- You can write two hundred words about the place that are not true of anywhere else.
- There is a phone number and a way to ask for a quote on the page.
- It is not simply your Leeds page with the word Leeds swapped out.
When not to make one
Do not make a town page for somewhere you have never worked and do not want to. You will get calls from it, they will be an hour away, and you will either turn them down or drive an hour for a job that does not pay for the diesel.
Do not make one for a place you have nothing to say about. If the only way to fill the page is to paste in the town's history from Wikipedia and a weather line, leave it out. Those pages read exactly as hollow as they are, and a thin page for a town you cannot serve is worse than no page at all.
Do not make forty of them by find and replace. It is the fastest way to end up with a site full of near identical pages, which is precisely what the spam policies describe, and it makes every page on the site look cheaper.
So how many is sensible
For a one van firm, three to six. Your own town, then the two or three nearby places you already get work from, then perhaps one you would like more of.
For a firm with a few vans covering a proper patch, eight to fifteen is comfortable. Beyond that you need either genuine depth in each one or somebody whose job it is to keep them all real.
Start with the towns where you already have photos. That is usually four or five, and it is enough. Add one a month as the jobs come in, with the photo from that job, and in a year you have a dozen pages that all pass the bar rather than forty that do not.
Do the biggest town last, not first. It is the hardest to rank for and the easiest to get wrong. Win the smaller towns around it where the competition is three firms and a directory, and you get calls while you are still building.
One more thing about the towns you skip
Not having a page for a town does not mean you cannot work there. Your homepage can list the wider area you cover in plain words, so anyone who finds you still knows the drive is on the table. The town pages are for the searches you want to win, not a fence around your patch.
When we build a site we ask for your towns on day one, and we will tell you honestly if we think one of them is not worth a page yet.